High School Snowboarder Says it’s a Miracle He’s Alive

With his little brother buried under an avalanche, a teen cries out to God…with amazing results.

Matt's head was buried three feet below the surface. Because of his hood, there was a tiny area in front of his face that was ice-free. He tried to dig upward, but the snow has turning to ice because of the warmth of his breath. "He was cemented in. There was no way he could move. He dug up as far as he could, but he couldn't get to the surface."

“It was one of those mind-numbing moments that etches itself into a memory like nothing else,” reported WND. Matt had flown down the slope on his snowboard, but when the massive wave of snow caught him, “it hit me with a lot of force,” he told WND. With no idea how deep he was buried, he struggled, but knew it would take a miracle for him to survive.

“Michael, had flung himself backward when the snow broke to not get caught,” reports AG News, the news service of the Assemblies of God churches. “Then he had run down the slope after his brother.”

“The only thing I knew to do was cry out to God and ask, ‘What should I do – call search and rescue or go find him?’” Michael told AG News. “God spoke to me, ‘Go find your brother.’ I followed His orders, I didn’t think about it, I ran down the hill and chunks of snow the size of my truck were still coming down around me.”

Under the snow, Matt began to yell, but there was no response. “I'm probably going to die,” he thought. Remarkably, he felt God's peace. He remembered hearing about a prophecy given to his mother, Becky, when she was four-months pregnant with him. She had started to hemorrhage and a doctor had informed her by phone she was probably miscarrying.

However, her husband was leading a group of teens from church and the kids all prayed over her. “One of the kids prophesied, ‘You’re not going to lose that baby because God’s going to do great things with him,’” Becky remembers.

The bleeding stopped and Matt was born full-term and healthy.

“My brother definitely has a calling on his life,” Michael told AG News. “He leads worship, leads in the youth group and is so talented. I didn’t want to see that go to waste – because he’s going to do something great for God!”

Buried in the snow, Matt remembered that prayer. He says he knew he was in God's hands.

As his big brother ran down toward the bottom of the avalanche, chunks of snow the size of his truck were still coming down around him. There was no sign of his little brother and he had no idea where he was. Michael yelled for Matt, but heard only silence.

Out of an area about 100 yards by 200 yards, Michael happened to step on the exact spot was his brother was entombed. His boot sunk down into a depression the size of a baseball.

And that’s when the brothers got their miracle.

The heel of Michael’s boot sank into the tiny depression in the snow – “where I had been digging,” recalls Matt, “and I could see his boot. I called out, ‘Mike, I’m fine, Mike I’m fine.’”

“I stopped yelling for a second, and I heard Matt,” recalls Michael. “I looked down and there was this little tiny hole about the size of a baseball in the snow. I started digging frantically.”

The miracle they got was that Michael’s boot, in a snowslide of tens of thousands of square yards, hit on the exact four-inch square spot where Matt had been digging from beneath the snow.

“When I found him, I broke down and cried,” Michael told AG News. “I was so happy – the fear and heartache I just experienced were gone!”

It took Michael half an hour to dig out enough of the hardened snow to release his brother. Meanwhile, sections of the mountain continued to collapse. When the brothers returned the following day, the rest of the ridge had collapsed, burying the entire area under several additional feet.

Was it one of those one-in-a-million chance events that saved Matt, or divine intervention?

The brothers have no doubt. They know what they heard and lived that day.

"Matt should have died," their dad says

. "The only reason he was found is that God did it. I know it was a miracle. There is no doubt in my mind."

Check out an interview of the brothers describing their miraculous ordeal.